[img]https://i.imgur.com/vJnNa9n.png[/img] Hello, lovelies! Since My Littlest Skeleton is now on Steam I figured I’d start using the community features more! It’s the start of August and a whole bunch of progress has been made! This is the month when I took a step back and started to look at the project a little more seriously and objectively. Thing’s we’re starting to get away from me a little bit, feature creep has been setting in and this project seems to be getting larger and larger. Obviously, the main objective of this project is to make a fun game where you care for your very own little skeleton chum, that’s what the marketing says - but I really had to ask myself if this game is actually going to be fun to play or not, what’s the real objective here? What are the most important things to focus on? It was hard to say, there’s just too much in the design doc right now for a solo dev to reasonably complete. I got a lot done but none of it resembles a game, it’s a bunch of disparate systems masquerading as a game. It wasn’t really fun to play for more than 5 minutes, the novelty wore off fast. I also wasn’t entirely happy with the level of quality I was producing. Why is that? Too much too fast, that’s the conclusion I came to, 2 fast 2 skeletons. There’s only one thing for it: [h2]Back to the beginning, it is, what [i]is[/i] My Littlest Skeleton?[/h2] My Littlest Skeleton is a cosy and relaxing virtual pet simulator where you care for a number of wobbly clumsy Skeletons, each with their own needs and personalities. You care for them by furnishing their surroundings, ensuring their needs are met, and maintaining everything. Cool, not too different from the original vision, but with multiple Skeletons because more interaction = more fun, right? That’s the equation? So how am I getting there? via Iteration. I mentioned earlier that I wasn’t happy with the current quality of what I was producing, this was primarily around the actual Skeletons themselves, as the project has matured so have my ambitions for what I wanted to achieve along with the setting in reality around the amount of work this is going to take. This has led already to a number of iterations around how the Skeletons behave, originally, it was a single Skeleton, one single model - with baked animations that I created in Blender. This seems like a solid approach but I quickly ran into issues around adding new items to the game as each item needs its own suite of animations, and each suite of animations needs to be added into the game in a reasonable way - in this case, a new Interaction script & Timeline created for each. I went down this path for a couple of weeks but it just wasn’t cutting it, either the game would never get done or it would launch with a pretty low amount of actual content. I decided to solve this issue by rethinking the strategy, I opted to go for procedural animation, that way fewer baked animations are needed, new items and furniture can be added much more efficiently, and the inherent wonkiness of all of this simply adds to the Skeletons charm. This is still the strategy I am going with, and I am now elbow deep in this second iteration. The first one worked as a proof of concept but it was a little [i]too[i] wonky, walking used to break a lot and you can forget having the Skeleton grab objects. Since the real bulk of this game is the Skeletons interacting with things I need to get this fundamental foundation correct, so I’m spending a lot of time on it. All this is to say, I’ve thrown away the Skeleton and started to build a newer, stronger, and more attractive one. [h2]So, what have I done this month?[/h2] [img]https://i.imgur.com/e1aAGXd.gif[/img] [b]I have optimised the Skeleton model and armature[/b], this includes cleaning up the topology for better deformation, and I have completely redone the weight painting from scratch to better lend itself to the needs of procedural animation. [b]I have changed the Skeletons textures and materials,[/b] before the Skeletons Bone Tone could be chosen from a preset list of colours, during my introspection I decided this is a little limiting for the creativity that this game should afford, so I am instead planning on letting you customise the Skeleton’s tone however you want (within reason). This has required a change in the current material setup for the model. This is just the groundwork really, the actual customization will come later in development. [b]I am reworking the entire procedural animation system[/b], the last attempt was my first-ever attempt at this and it shows so I’ve taken what I’ve learned there and re-applied it to a new system which feels a lot more robust and predictable. Currently, the walk cycle is in place and I’m working on the interactions with objects. Next update I will probably go more in-depth on this. This is the entire focus right now because this is to me the most important bit to get right first, it will dictate how the entire rest of the game goes… I wanted this month's update to serve as not only the “what” but the “why” of the decisions I’ve made and the things I’ve chosen to focus on this month. See you next month! 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